How Much I Made w/ Print on Demand

in this video i'm going to start a print on demand clothing company and see if it's still a viable way to make some passive income on the side here we go [Music] so in theory print on demand sounds pretty great you can start a business selling shirts phone cases photo prints whatever and not worry about a lot of the upfront costs not worry about the shipping the printing the inventory everything that usually goes along with a business like this it would totally suck to order 100 shirts with your design on it and then not sell any of them and then they just end up in a box in your parents garage like my old band's t-shirts sorry mom and dad so you're probably familiar with print on demand redbubble and society6 are two of the large companies that have a wide product offering and allow graphic designers and artists to upload their work and keep a cut of the profits so when you open a storefront on one of these platforms they usually tell you the hard cost for each product to have your design printed on it and then you can set your own profit margin deciding how much you want to make based off what you think your customer will pay for it i actually had a redbubble shop in 2012 where i made some arrested development fan art but unfortunately that was around the time that netflix was bringing the show back and they took down my designs for copyright infringement but not before i made a couple hundred bucks that is one aspect to be careful of because selling fan art really isn't legal but a lot of these big companies don't pursue legal action because a it's probably not worth their time involved and b it kind of seems like a big guy picking on the little guy scenario especially when the little guy is just a fan of what the big guy is doing redbubble actually launched a fan art initiative where they partnered with some tv shows and bands and they allow artists to upload fan art as long as they meet certain guidelines for each show or band or whatever it is that they're doing so that's pretty but let's talk about some of the downsides involved with print on demand from a customer perspective shipping takes a little bit longer than you may be accustomed to when you're ordering from amazon or a traditional retail outlet because the design that you order has to be printed as a one-off at the factory then packed and shipped out to you from a business owner perspective i've already mentioned some of the pros involved but the major con is that you're really eating into your profit margin by paying a premium to have these print-on-demand companies do all the heavy lifting for you there's really only so much you can charge for a t-shirt unless you're kanye so you're working with some pretty narrow margins but you also have very limited costs as well okay so now that i've covered the basics of print on demand let's go over my game plan for this video first i'm going to do some research and brainstorming to come up with some ideas for what i want to sell then i need to research some print on domain companies make sure that they carry the products that i want to offer and i need to make sure that they integrate with shopify because that's the platform i'm going to use to sell then most importantly i need to create good designs that i think will sell then i need to create the products on the print on domain platform then i had to buy a domain i have to sign up for shopify and then finally put together some ads to hopefully generate some sales that's plenty of work to do so let's move on to phase one research [Music] before i get started i'm going to check out the sites i mentioned earlier society6 and redbubble see what's trending see what's popular with customers so i know what's actually selling i'm also going to look at urban outfitters website see what new designs they're coming out with it might help me get some ideas [Music] so i think it's going to be best to narrow down to a niche and that way my brand will have some sort of identity with it and then when i advertise it'll be easier to target the right demographic of people who are more likely to convert to a sale i love the 80s resurgence in pop culture lately and i'm a sucker for the nostalgia of my childhood like i know a lot of other people my age are so that's the route i'm going to take with this clothing company [Music] shut up okay so i'm definitely not the greatest graphic designer out there i wouldn't even call myself a graphic designer but i think i have just enough chops to get some designs together that i think will look good so if you don't have any graphic design shops at all and you want to start something similar i'd recommend partnering up with a friend or someone else who has artistic ability who can put together some designs for you and maybe share the profit or you may be able to find some marketplaces online where you can buy commercial licenses for different graphics that you could use for print on demand time to move on to phase two now it's time to find a print-on-demand company now i want my website to be independent of whatever on-demand platform i use so for instance i don't want it to be a shop on redbubble.com i want it to be its own independent website where the customer doesn't even know it's print on demand so i'm going to search shopify's apps for print on demand companies that already integrate with shopify and see what i can find [Music] so i think i'm gonna go with printful for this i look through all the apps and printful seems to have the best product offerings and it has really good reviews so next i have a few ideas for design so i'm gonna spend the weekend working on them and this isn't really a step that i can breeze through because it doesn't matter how cool or unique my idea is because if the design sucks no one's going to want to wear it on a shirt so i mentioned earlier that i love the nostalgia of my childhood and the whole re-emergence of the 80s and 90s pop culture so for my clothing company i'm going to call it nostalgic clothing my first idea is to take some popular brands from that time and replace their logo with the word nostalgic now i should mention that this is likely some mild trademark infringement but my defense is i am parroting the logos by essentially saying that nostalgia for that brand is better than the brand actually is the memory is always sweeter than the reality of it please don't sue me [Music] [Music] okay so it's been about a week since i have given you an update so let me tell you what i've been up to i spent last weekend creating a handful of designs to offer in my shop and then i went through printful's catalog of products deciding what design should go on what product what color the shirts should be etc etc so that part was really tedious it took all weekend pretty much but i was able to easily import those products into shopify once i got them all set up on printful so that was cool then i had to take a few days off to work on videos from my other channel mango street and this weekend i've been working on the website more and more just trying to get look more polished and get closer to launch let's pull up how many uh products i have so i have 35 products in my shop right now my idea is to have a happy medium amount of products i don't want so few that it's too limiting and it might not be someone's cup of tea and i don't want so many that the visitor just becomes so overwhelmed that they don't end up making a purchase i also don't want to have a t-shirt with one design and like five color options that to me screams print on demand i don't want that to turn people off so instead i'm going to pick what color i think the shirt should be and just offer that one color for that one product for that one design for pricing i wasn't so concerned about profit margin i just want to have like a proof of concept that people like these designs from there i think i can then raise the prices a little bit because i do think i'll have to spend quite a bit on ads just to start generating some sales so i want to make sure there's enough profit margin in there to pay for the ads and product and then leave me with a little bit left over i really spend a lot of time with the site trying to give it its own identity so it just doesn't look so straight out of the box your typical shopify drop shipping type site so i went with like this dusty powder blue background and then i chose a font that kind of encapsulates uh that retro vibe that i want to go for and that way it just kind of makes the brand feel more established more defined i was able to purchase the domain get nostalgic dot co which i think is a it's a great domain i don't mind dot co websites at all i think they're totally fine i think people are used to that now so get nostalgic.co is the website and i have at the top of the website you can shop by nostalgia is what i'm calling it so i have like nintendo themed products sega lisa frank oregon trail nickelodeon stuff like that if you love one of those products you can just easily click on that and you can see everything that's been tagged with that brand so nintendo designs etc etc um one other thing i did as as i was thinking about building assets for ads i signed up for a site called placeit which you may be familiar with basically i sign up for a 15 a month subscription and this allows you to mock up your designs on like thousands of different products and photos models etc and i thought it'd be really cool to have some more like lifestyle mock-ups for my designs for advertisements and one nice thing about printful is that they do have some really good-looking mock-ups but i just wanted more variety and i found some really cool ones on playsets so as i was downloading them i decided it would actually be really cool just to make every product in my shop have one of those lifestyle type mock-ups instead of one of the ones from printfuls i think it looks really cool and i think it looks just a little bit different than all the other clothing shops out there so another thing i did is i wanted to add product reviews on the site since social proof is super important in helping people have trust in a brand it's more likely to convert a visitor if they see other people have a good experience with the product so what i did is i installed an app on shopify called product reviews it's free and then i went on printful's website printful has reviews for all their products too so what i did is i found each product i'm offering i found some reviews and then i actually manually typed them out in to a spreadsheet because there's no way to import reviews from printful into shopify that i could find so i did that manually and then in the product reviews app i could import those reviews from a spreadsheet into my store they're all reviews for that same product it's just a different design you know a lot of shop owners are on printful leaving reviews on the quality of the product so they're legitimate reviews it's just not for my specific designs and i think that's okay just to get the ball rolling on the shop so i've spent about four full days working on everything so far and i'm going to now put together some assets for some ads and then i am going to launch some facebook ads and we'll see hopefully i get some sales out of it i also think it's really important to experience things from a customer side of things so i'm going to order at least one shirt i want to test the quality make sure it's a good quality shirt probably quality and see how long shipping was see how the whole process is from a customer perspective and i think that's super important that way you can find any areas you may be able to make things run smoother for the customer or you can help them adjust their expectations appropriately if the shipping delays due to coven 19 or whatever and i can inspect the shirt a little bit more and i can even take more photos of it if i want since i do happen to dabble in photography okay so i'm hoping that when we launch the ads i'll get a lot of sales crossing my fingers i'll check back in in a few days [Music] well it's been quite a while since i last checked in and by a while i mean like three months because i kind of let this sit on the back burner and i wasn't too sure what to do with it well now it's time for this video to come to a close and i'm going to tell you what happened so i got my ads together and i ran targeted facebook ads and i mostly targeted men and women in the video game demographic i let these ads run for about a week i spent a total of eighty dollars and i only got two sales from it and to top it all off it was really just one customer who ordered two shirts for a total of sixty five dollars i offered free shipping on orders over forty dollars so i covered shipping and after printful charged 28.90 and i paid 525 for shipping i received 30.86 but of course i spent 80 on facebook ads to get those two sales so i'm still in the hole for like 50 bucks and to top it all off shopify charges 2.9 of the total order amount plus 30 cents so their cut was 2.19 leaving me with like 28 bucks but i did order one of my shirts and i got in the mail [Music] pretty good [Music] so overall i'm really happy with the shirt it's super comfortable the quality looks nice and it took about two to three weeks to get here which wasn't so bad considering the production slowdowns with kobe 19. the only thing with this shirt is the design is a little low so i think i'm going to update it and make a little higher up on the torso anyways the ads did not stop with facebook so let's get into that so i decided to buy some ads on a couple of instagram pages i mostly searched for 90s nostalgia and video game meme pages and the first one i found was a smaller account had like 28 000 followers had decent interaction nothing special and they were charging me 26 for a 24 hour post with a bio link and then also an instagram story with a swipe up link so i went ahead and purchased that here's what my instagram story looked like [Applause] [Music] and here's my instagram post [Music] so unfortunately i forgot to grab a screenshot before they took down the post so i didn't end up seeing how many likes or any kind of interaction that it got but i did get 50 visits to my shop and zero sales so not to be deterred i decided to give it another shot with a larger account hopefully maybe this one would turn up with some sales so this account had over 160 000 followers and pretty solid interaction so they charged me 85 for the same deal the same post and instagram story both with links i ran the same ads and it's pretty similar ad copy after 20 hours my post only had 444 likes which was pretty abysmal compared to the rest of their content on their instagram profile but i did get 90 visits to my shop but once again whopping zero in sales at this point i've spent 163 dollars and 19 cents on ads all to make like 28 so not so great for me [Music] okay so what have i learned from this experiment well for starters i try to create a clothing brand from scratch and while i thought the designs were pretty cool they probably weren't cool enough to get someone to spend 31 dollars on a brand that they've never heard of second i end up getting over 800 visitors to my site with a 0.12 conversion rate which is just horrible so this either tells me my pricing is too high or something else on my website is detracting the buyer from making that purchase so while this experiment did not end up being profitable for me it's definitely not the nail in the coffin for print on demand i plan on uploading these designs to redbubble and see how they do there where i can rely on redbubble's existing customer base and their own advertising and hopefully people would find me organically through the site that way i can cut down all my overhead of running the shopify paying for everything involved with that another route i might try with print on demand is creating more trendy word-based designs that i've seen become popular with other print-on-demand businesses and the key to that is knowing who you're targeting what they want the design to look like and also what they want the design to say okay before i wrap up let me just break down how much i spent overall on everything i spent eight dollars for the domain name i spent 37 dollars for a month of shopify plus an app called frequently bought together which kind of encourages additional purchases of different items on the site so you can kind of bundle things together and then i spent 80 on facebook ads 111 on instagram ads and 15 for the mock-up site called placeit that i used to create all the images from my website and my ads that adds up to a total of 251 dollars in expenses and i generated 28.67 in revenue for a total loss of 222.33 i'll probably leave my shop up for another month or so if you want to take a look at it the url is get nostalgic dot co and then you can kind of see what the site look like for yourself if you have had success with print on demand and tell me all the things i did wrong how much i suck or what i could do better feel free to leave me a comment below that's all for this one i'll see you guys next time bye [Music]

Channel: Daniel Inskeep

Views: 148,572

Keywords: selling shirts online, making money online, personal finance, society6, dropshipping, passive income 2020, make money online, daniel inskeep, best passive income ideas, trading stocks, selling shirts on etsy, shopify, selling shirts, print on demand, redbubble, make passive income, how to make passive income, passive income, print on demand 2020, passive income ideas

Id: TUR7RAZEZSk

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020